Vestor Logic Screen Cast: How to Add a Custom Landing Tab to a Facebook Fan Page
September 2, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler · View Comments
In today’s quick screen cast I’ll show you how to add a custom landing tab to your Facebook fan page.
Additional Note: Sometimes Facebook will automatically add your FMBL as a tab. If you are NOT seeing your fbml as a tab or as an option in when you click the plus sign, go to edit page > scroll to your fbml > under the fbml title click “Application Settings” > make sure the tab is set to “added”.
Stay tuned for more screen casts for Facebook and Twitter. Please comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for what you’d like to see!
Related screen casts:
- Vestor Logic Screen Cast: How to Create a Facebook Fan Page
- Vestor Logic Screen Cast: Intro to FBML for Facebook
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Vestor Logic Screen Cast: How to Create a Facebook Fan Page
August 27, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler · View Comments
In this brief screen cast I’ll cover what you need to create your own Facebook fan page for your business.
Additional Note: If you want to create a test page to experiment with building your own fan page, when you are done you can delete the page by going to the page you created>edit page>delete page (link in sub nav near the thumbnail)
Stay tuned for more screen casts for Facebook and Twitter. Please comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for what you’d like to see!
Star Client: How Desert Perinatal is Doing Social Right
August 5, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler · View Comments
Several months ago we had the pleasure to work with Tina Senter at Desert Perinatal Associates in Las Vegas, NV. Tina runs the marketing department for this practice specializing in high-risk pregnancies.
Vestor Logic was responsible for redesigning their existing website and implementing a WordPress install. We set up accounts and built a Facebook fan page and a Twitter background to maintain a consistent look across their various marketing initiatives. All of these are pretty foundational elements when starting a social media marketing initiative.
Often a client will have big ideas about all the ways that they could use social media to reach out to their existing clients, but fall short when it comes time to take the reins back from us to DO something with it all. Then again, sometimes we get a client like Tina who is ready to run with social media…
Here are some of the things that Tina is doing right:
- Desert Perinatal runs a weekly contest looking for a super cute baby picture from their fans to use as their Facebook icon for the week.
- Tina uses Facebook to engage fans by posting common questions that most moms can’t help but answer in a forum like Facebook, such as: What is your biggest frustration as a parent right now? Or, how did you transition from a crib to toddler bed?
- She allows fans to post on the fan page wall. Parents will post pictures or questions of their own. She is allowing a community to form on her watch, without directly interfering or trying to guide that process.
- Tina creates a monthly newsletter featuring classes, products, recipes, letters from the doctors and Q&A with the nurses, always promoting the Facebook page and Twitter feed to build awareness.
- She also had Vestor Logic create a postcard-sized print version of the Facebook fan landing page as a take away at the front desk to build awareness.
- She uses tools to automatically post Facebook page updates to the Twitter feed.
- She runs a birthday cupcake promotion encouraging fans to post birthday baby pics and receive a cupcake certificate from a local bakery.
Most importantly, she is consistently DOING something in her social media space.
Tina certainly has some built-in advantages with her “product”, new moms are desperate to connect with other new moms and are frequently stuck at home for the first few weeks/months. Her population is all local to one city. She works within a field that people are passionate about: having babies. All those cute pictures don’t hurt, either.
BUT, she easily could have set up these accounts and wandered back to the textbook marketing approaches. She chose to move forward, stay engaged and experiment and it is truly paying off.
So. What can you do to create a community within your client base? How can you engage with your clients on a more meaningful level?
Update: We know, it’s not that easy for everyone. Maybe you don’t have the bandwidth, the staff, the understanding to make it happen for your organization. Soon we will be releasing a set of social media launch products: labs and engagement packages, to help get over that initial hump between set up and social stardom. Stay tuned…
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How To: Setup a “Listening Channel” for your brand
February 23, 2010 by Tim Miner · View Comments
Want to know what people are saying about your company online? There is an easy way to create a “Listening Channel” to monitor the online chatter about your brand, your name, your keywords or phrases or any of the discussions that you find interesting. This screencast will show you how to get started.
If you would like a little help setting up your listening channel for brand monitoring, just contact us. We are happy to help!
Yammer is a powerful link manager
February 22, 2010 by Tim Miner · View Comments
Yammer is one of our most used social tools at Vestor Logic. We use it as an internal Twitter platform to aggregate links, share ideas, and communicate on active client campaigns. It has become indispensable for us and is used by our team every single day. Think of Yammer as a private Twitter platform for your organization.
You can setup your own Yammer network in minutes here.
Integration with Google Reader
We have integrated Yammer with our Google Reader to share interesting blog posts and articles from the numerous feeds that we subscribe to and review each day. Sometimes we find blog posts from our favorite blogs that prompt internal discussion. A member of our team will Yam It! using the bookmarklet and apply a hashtag to make it easy to follow the conversation in the future.
Yammer provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate with Google Reader here.
Yammer as a link manager
Recently, we began using Yammer to manage articles, blog posts, links, and web pages that apply to an active client campaign that we are working on.
For example, we are leading a one-day workshop for a large corporate client in early March and we have begun collecting relevant stories and resources in Yammer to help build the presentation that we will give at the event. We submit the link to the relevant content, hashtag it with the designated client tag, and then discuss it internally using Yammer. We can go back at any point and view all of the submissions we have under that tag to begin crafting the slides for the presentation.
For this project, we now have 30 posts under that client tag and we should have more than 50 posts by the time we begin building the presentation. This is by far the easiest way for us to aggregate all of this information. This is a very powerful way for us to manage all of these links in one place and easily recall them when we are ready to review.
Our take on Yammer
Yammer provides us with an easy way to aggregate information from other sites and blogs in one place. We can discuss each post independent of all the others in our stream. It has become one of our most used social tools and I cannot imagine not having it as part of our arsenal. All of our posts are preserved forever and the platform offers a free account.
How can you go wrong with that! If you are storing links somewhere else, get on the Yammer platform and make your life easier. You will find that it provides more efficiency to your research process and will certainly allow you to perform better for your clients and the projects that you are working on.
For companies that are accustomed to discussing topics regularly with the entire team, Yammer provides a perfect platform to do so. Team members can subscribe to hashtags, discuss the content using comments, and the entire discussion is preserved for future reference.
Yammer’s new release is coming
Today, we discovered that Yammer will be reviewing its newest release on Thursday. It’s certainly worth a listen. You can register for the upcoming event here.
Are you using Yammer?
What are your thoughts? How are you promoting discussions in your organization? Are the discussions taking place on an internal system or out in the open? Tell us how you are doing this? We want to know. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
How We Use Social Media
February 19, 2010 by Tim Miner · View Comments
At Vestor Logic, we use social media apps and platforms in a number of different ways. Some create efficiencies for us in the daily work flow. Many help us accelerate our learning curve about new technologies and tactics. Others give us insights into trends and breaking news that we would be hard pressed to discover without the help of social apps. And some of the things we do/use are for pure enjoyment.
The following is an inventory or sorts. It is a list of the tools that we use everyday and a description of how we use them. We are sharing this to give you a better idea of how we are embracing social media to make our business better but is not intended to be a blueprint for your business. Your needs and goals may require that you rework this mix of tools and maybe even how you use them.
Tell us how you are using social media to benefit your business by commenting below. We want to learn from you and your experiences as well.
The Vestor Logic Blog
Certainly the hub in our business model
The Vestor Logic blog serves up our original content and allows us to share our insights into the ever-developing social media landscape. We post weekly and will increase our frequency now that we have finished the development of a few other internal projects that have been huge time-sucks as of late. Our model is simple: create content on the VL blog and syndicate it through the various social outposts that we have created. Though our team has been at the forefront of social media for a number of years (we launched the first social network dedicated to real estate investors in Feb 2004: see The Investor Nexus), our Vestor Logic brand is relatively new having just launched in August 2009. We are still building out our foundation and further defining our marketing strategy just like many other companies.
The Vestor Logic site and blog are powered by a Content Management System (CMS) called WordPress. We host the site on our own servers and recognize the effort as one that will never truly be complete. We constantly tweak pages, add new widgets, and refine the message for our visitors. WordPress as a CMS makes this process easy. The learning curve is short and almost anyone can master the basics in a short time. The other big benefit of WordPress for us is the collection of plugins that offer social functions like Sociable, Tweetmeme and WWSGD. These plugins provide great functions to our site and cost nothing to use.
Facebook Profiles
We post to our personal profiles several times a day
Jessica (Jessica’s profile) and I (Tim’s profile) both have Facebook profiles that we use primarily to stay in touch with our friends. Of course, this counts for business too as many of our clients are friends or are referred to us by our friends. We post multiple times throughout the day on a variety of topics but try to keep the business talk to a minimum. Of course, we do share cool tips and tricks with our friends for some of the more popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Both of us are passionate about other things. For me it’s hiking and I share pics and accounts of my trips on my profile page. Jessica has artistic roots. Her posts cover the spectrum of cool and unusual topics. She is a great follow for anyone looking for a laugh or smile during your workday!
Facebook Fan Page
We update the Fan Page a few times each day
The Vestor Logic Fan Page is a testing ground for us. We test different tactics relating to design and functionality in an ongoing effort to stay ahead of the curve and provide the best advice for our clients. We regularly post links to interesting articles from our favorite blogs, thought leaders and news aggregators. We post links to our new blog entries and maintain an active stream from www.TimMiner.com covering my ramblings on everything from social media to hiking to kids and family.
I use Seesmic on my desktop and my Blackberry to check the Twitter stream multiple times each day
Our Twitter account is used primarily to research the current trends in social media and uncover the news sources (i.e. blog posts) that are covering those trends. We use Twitter to test drive concepts with other social media pros and to syndicate our own content from the Vestor Logic blog. We see Twitter as a news source and a testing ground for ideas. Our experience suggests that the value is far greater for those activities than it is for generating sales. But to be fair, we mostly follow social media people and do not focus on building a following for potential customers. Your experiences may bear more fruit from sales initiatives if you target more individuals that could be potential customers. Our Facebook page also posts to our Twitter stream.
I visit the site several times a day and try to post at least one update each day
We have a company listing on LinkedIn for Vestor Logic and I also maintain my own profile. We connect with other social media folks, each of our clients and prospects, the members of our past projects like Investment Riches and all of our referral sources. I participate in various groups and maintain close ties to many of my classmates from college on LinkedIn. We have had a fair number of referrals come from our relationships on LinkedIn, most coming from connections made years ago that now see what we are doing in social media thanks to the updates that we publish regularly.
YouTube
Our YouTube activity is just beginning – look for our new video series “Social 60″
There really isn’t any excuse for not posting video on a regular basis. I wish had some great reason for not doing it. But I don’t! We have been busy building our Vestor Logic outposts and YouTube fell to the bottom half of the list. But we are working on it now. We are launching a video series called “Social 60″ which is a video format that will allow me to rant on the top social media issues for 60 second clips and encourage responses and feedback. I don’t expect these videos to provide clearly defined answers up front but rather to create a place for us to discuss the hot topics of the day and encourage others to share their opinions. Together we will reach more of a consensus and perhaps all learn something. Look for a few new videos each week.
Micro-blog: www.TimMiner.com
This is my safe place to test ideas
It usually takes Jessica and I a few days to work through a new idea or concept or to reach an opinion on a new platform (like Google Buzz) that just launched. The micro-blog allows us to do two things: explore the value of Posterous (which is the backbone of the micro-blog) and test ideas that are not yet ready for the Vestor Logic blog. I also post pics from my hikes and backpacking trips, share interesting links to stories I find, and share my joy as a father of a 19 month old little boy.
Yammer
Yammer is our own private Twitter platform
I jumped on Yammer the middle of 2009 and have found that its value to Vestor Logic is really that of a link repository. I use a bookmarklet labeled “Yam It!” to archive links to interesting blog posts or articles or web pages and then check back later to review them in more detail. The most effective practice however is to use hashtags to organize my link submissions by topic and most importantly by client. I am working on the structure of a one day Discovery Workshop for a client right now. I have more than 25 archived links that point to blog posts and articles that are relevant to their event. I will go back about a week before the event and revisit each one turning many into slides for the event. I have found this practice to be very effective and it allows me to share all of it with my team.
Picasa + Flickr
I love photos!
I have nearly 15,000 images on my laptop (and a backup copy on Google using web albums in Picasa for just $20 a year!). I take pictures at each event we are part of, all presentations, every hike I embark on, all family events, and just about anything else I can think of. Up to this point, I have been storing all the personal stuff on my laptop install of Picasa. But recently, I changed my strategy to incorporate Flickr. Moving forward, I will use Picasa for personal images mostly and Flickr for the business stuff. Of course, there will be some spill over as I find it very difficult to delineate between work and personal.
Google Docs
A great way to share and collaborate on documents
Jessica and I have been using Google Docs for a long time. We collaborate on project specs, new page content for the website, new blog posts, just about anything you can do in Word or Excel. We use the Form tool to create presentation evaluations. Now that Google Docs allows you to upload ANY file to Docs and the storage is so cheap it makes it very easy to aggregate most of our docs on the Google platform.
Google Analytics
The best free tool for website owners in my opinion
We have a Google Analytics account that monitors all three of our web properties which provides priceless insights into visitor behavior. This application allows us to make changes and modifications to our websites to improve on the experience for all of our visitors. It also provides feedback on which social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Email Campaigns, AdWords) are referring the most traffic. We look at Analytics every week.
Google Reader
RSS feeds are our lifeline!
I currently have 138 subscriptions in my reader. They produce somewhere between 400-500 new articles a day and cover social media, real estate, general interest, business, hiking, and even our ECHO. Our ECHO folder is a collection of RSS feeds that monitor platforms like Google Blog Search, Google keyword alerts, Twitter Search, Icerocket Blog Search, and each of our own RSS feeds for mentions of our brand. This is a great way to establish a basic listening channel for monitoring the chatter about your company. I spend about 90 minutes a day scanning the feeds, starring items, and reading about the topics that matter to me. This may be one of the most important functions I perform each day.
SlideRocket
SlideRocket is PowerPoint on steroids!
We use SlideRocket for all of our presentations and also for the image galleries on our site like the Portfolio page. They just recently released some social plugins including a live Twitter stream that can be integrated into live presentations. The best feature for us is the portability of the presentations and the fact that they are housed online accessible from any web browser. Of course, there is also the choice of linking to your presentations online using a link or simply embedding it into any blog post or web page. Very cool application!
Seesmic
Our desktop and mobile Twitter and Facebook interface
We have used many of the popular Twitter clients including HootSuite and Tweetdeck but have found Seesmic to be the most comfortable. They all do most of the same things and there are tons of reviews out there already for each, but I think it is a personal preference. Bottom line – I like Seesmic!
Feedburner
RSS management and promotion made easy
Each of our three web properties is armed with a Feedburner feed to manage the subscriptions and promotion of the site RSS feeds for posts and comments. If you want to step up the value of your feeds you need to take a close look at Feedburner which is another Google product.
Mobile Apps on the Blackberry
I use mobile a great deal but I expect that usage to increase
I find that I am using my Blackberry Bold more and more to connect to my social outposts. There are apps for almost everything. It will only get better (for Blackberry users specifically) as the development of apps continue to provide a functional experience similar to what we get on our laptops or desktops. Currently, I use mobile apps for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google (which includes Picasa, Docs, Maps) and WordPress. I access a least half of these everyday if not more.
bit.ly
Keep it short!
Bit.ly is a URL shortening service that allows you to take those really long URLs and shorten them into something manageable. The service also tracks the metrics for each of your links showing you which content has the best reach or was most effective at reaching an audience. We see this as a nice compliment to the data we track using Google Analytics. I don’t visit our Bit.ly account as much as I should but will certainly do so more often now that we are running at full steam.
In testing…
Both of us are constantly testing new apps and programs. Currently, I have a list of about 25 that I am getting to know better and the following three have excited me the most in recent days. Feel free to check these out too and see if they fit for your business strategy.
- Swix – a social metrics dashboard of sorts
- Social Network Integration in Outlook – a cool way to connect Outlook to LinkedIn (and Facebook soon!)
- SpredFast – a cradle to grave social marketing platform created by friend Scott with robust management and analysis capabilities
So what are you doing?
How are you managing your social marketing efforts? Are you doing the same things we are? What are you doing differently? We want to know…besides, I showed you mine so now you need to show me yours!